Revisiting Season One: Who is Hope?
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Hello, it's Andrea, host of Nobody Should Believe Me. And today we are re-airing the second episode of our very first season. So if you are listening for the first time, welcome to the beginning chapters of our show. And if you have already heard this episode and are re-listening, or if you just want to skip ahead, please do so.

Do stay tuned after the episode. I will be back from the future or the present, whichever you like, to tell you some backstory that I have not shared in detail before about how this podcast came into the world and how all of that almost didn't happen. So

So do tune in for that. And in the meantime, if you want even more from Nobody Should Believe Me, please subscribe on Patreon or on Apple. We've got lots of exclusive bonus content there, including the deep dive that I'm doing this month on the Justina Pelletier case with friend of the show, Dr. Becks, also known as Secret Florida Dr. Friend.

That's a case I've gotten a lot of questions about for its similarities and differences from the Maya Kowalski case that we covered last season. So if you're interested in going down the rabbit hole with us on that, please do join us there. And I will be talking about that case on the main feed at some point. Also, subscribers are a very big part of how I keep this show going and how I keep it independent. But if monetary support is not an option for you, rating, reviewing, and sharing the show wherever you talk to friends...

also helps us a great deal. So without further ado, here is episode two.

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Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. 33-year-old Hope Yabera wants to find a peaceful place to die. Hope's battle with brain, lung, and bone cancer leaves her frail and weak. She has three children. Her youngest is herself fighting a terminal case of cystic fibrosis.

People believe their eyes. That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this, is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. How could a mother purposely hurt her own child? Hope Ibarra subjected her baby to unnecessary surgeries, even poisoning her. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, there is still a lot about my sister's story that I don't know and many things that I will probably never know. It really messes with your sense of reality in a way where you are then going back through entire decades of your life trying to piece it together with what you now know to be true and trying to reconcile that with your experiences as you remember them

If you are just joining us, please go back and listen to episode one. In that episode, we covered a lot about Hope's early life that led her to this point and also what this has to do with my life and my journey. I spoke to former investigative journalist Deanna Boyd about the moment when Hope Ybarra's behavior really escalated.

Hope basically had told family that she had been battling cancer off and on three different times. Started with bone cancer, later moved to her lungs and her brains, caused her to lose her hearing. She had to have a cochlear implant. And then ultimately the third cancer, when it had returned to her brain,

had basically said it was inoperable and that it was going to be terminal and this was it. And she shared that with family. She shared that with friends. She shared it with the world. She had all these different blogs where she talked about what it was like to be dying and all these experiences she was trying to have, these bucket list items she was trying to do prior to that time. And you just would read these and think, oh, what a brave woman. What a great mom.

and she's just living life to the fullest while she can and she's so brave and loving. She's a very strong woman and she wants truly to live but unfortunately the cancer seems to be stronger than she is at this point. It was a story that touched the hearts of North Texans. A woman on her deathbed, she and her family facing eviction. Texans poured out their sympathy and opened their wallets to help.

Hope had convinced her family and her entire community that she was facing cancer. Her sister, Robin Putscher, remembers how brave Hope always seemed throughout this process.

Everybody who met her was astounded at what she had been through and how she maintained her faith and her composure and her ability to carry on with life with a zest for it. You know, she was just really prepared for whatever life threw at her. She never appeared to be overwhelmed by it. She would talk about it freely. You know, everything that happened to her

It was just another phase for her. Like, this is just something I'm going through. This is just life. I'm going to keep chucking through it. And she always seemed to come out ahead. She lost her hair, but it was okay. Look at these great wigs I have and look at these hats. And, oh, I'm sick today, but that's okay. You know, we'll go to the zoo tomorrow. I mean, she was still so outgoing. All of these things that we went through, my sister had cancer multiple times.

It was during this supposed bout with cancer that Hope told her family she'd become pregnant with twin girls. She also told her family that she lost that pregnancy due to radiation treatments. She lost babies. She lost her hearing. All of these things seem, looking back, traumatic. Going through all of those motions, they did not feel traumatic. They felt like life.

So what did it feel like for you when Hope told you that she was diagnosed with cancer? I was still in high school, so I didn't have much experience with that. And she was never afraid, so I was never afraid. And at that point, did you believe her? Yeah.

Yeah, our whole family did. There was no reason not to believe her. There wasn't anything that said, well, how'd she get cancer? Why'd she get cancer? We never questioned it because there was no reason to. Hope had never even, you know, at this point, stolen an extra piece of pizza and blamed it on the dog. Like, she was so trustworthy and so...

You know, in her everyday life, she worked, she took care of her kids. You could rely on her. Why would we not rely on her to tell us the truth about that? She shaved her eyebrows. Looking back at a picture, she still had eyelashes. How can somebody who lost all of her hair still have eyelashes? But you don't think like that back then. Hope's baby brother, Nick Putscher, shared with me what this time was like for him.

The first time that she had cancer, it was shocking. There's always been something small, but this is a big deal. Like this is life altering. And how do we work through it right as a family? Because now she's got all of these things that she's dealing with. She's got kids. She's got Fabian who works a lot. So how do we help step in and help cover for that? And that's the one thing I really remember about it is like, OK, Hope's going to be fine. I never doubted that.

What do we do to help make it easier on her? Whoever she needs help with, pick them up from school, take them to the house, whatever, while she's doing treatments or in the hospital and then Fabian's coaching and really busy and just trying to take care of the family when in Hope's absence, it's like, okay, well, let's step in and help. Hope's community really rallied around her while she was on this supposed cancer journey. Here again is investigative journalist Deanna Boyd.

She had friends who started fundraising, you know, accounts for her. The family was given a make-a-wish trip. They were all able to go to Disneyland. Apparently, she had a former employer who, like, gave the family over $10,000, a great sum of money to help out.

People assuming that she had great medical expenses or just not the money necessarily to take those fun, lasting, you know, those vacations that create lasting memories for your children and feeling like she's not going to have much time with them. What can we do to help?

There were remission parties. She went skydiving, saying that was also on her bucket list and something that she always wanted to do. So she was constantly being given gifts and money. Yeah, she definitely got a lot of financial support, emotional support from friends, from family, from strangers.

We threw some of the most amazing, like, hey, she's better parties that I've, that some of the most fun times I've ever had, because Hope's here, she's going to be with us. The family's here, everyone's getting together, all the friends, people that we, you know, have been kind of experiencing some of this with us. I threw specifically, obviously, the first two times that it had come around.

We had a big party at my parents' house, which was my dad's dream house. I will never forget. She jumped out of an airplane and landed in the backyard, soaring in. And it was this amazing thing, right? She's like, I'm better. I'm

I'm going to jump out of an airplane. It's like, that's not what people who have had cancer do, but here she is jumping right out into the yard. And then we threw this big party and it was hope that we used to, her hair was a little bit shorter, but I mean, she was just what we had always known, right? She's hope she's happy. She's spunky. She's having fun. She being goofy. She's the center of the attention. She sent her the party, which is expected, right? Because that was the objective was to celebrate her being around. It was just a big deal because everyone was with the story. Everyone was following.

Hope had a blog that people could go read online and follow the story. It's like, what doesn't matter anymore? The whole story doesn't matter because here we are, now we're gonna move forward. The whole family is moving forward. Life is going on and it's not something that we have to revisit until we did. Third time was the hard one. She's going through this again. And I remember she brought us all to her house. The kids were there and she brings us all into a room.

I remember I think it was harder for her to tell us this time because this is the time where through telling us, she also was telling us, I'm not going to fight it this time. It totally changed the whole perspective for me. It's like, why not? Like, why are you being so selfish? You've got kids, you've got a family. Like, why are you choosing not to do this? And she's like, well, it's just, it's too much. It's hard. It's a lot of burden on the family. It's a lot of burden on you guys. It's not going away. It keeps coming back. So what do we do? And she's like, I'm just, I'm done fighting it. That's when it was, it was real. Like everything finally is like,

sucked all the life out of it. And it's like, this is no longer the same feeling. It's not the same life. It's not, we're not going to have her around anymore. Her father, Paul Pucher. Christmas of 2008, which was her last Christmas. So we had Robin and her kids. We had the whole family for Hope's last Christmas.

And it wasn't until that day that I accepted the fact that she was dying. Eight and a half years of this, I never accepted that I never, she's not dying. She's not, she's not going to die. That Christmas day, I remember, you know, going out behind the barn and hollering and screaming at God. And how about Fabian and Hope needing to talk to their three children about this?

She had written letters to each of her children, kind of goodbye letters, including to the youngest, talking about how she wished she could carry the burden that the little girl had to carry for her and, you know, how proud she is of her and that when the little girl goes to heaven, Mama will be waiting there and she'll reserve a garden of butterflies for you. She meant, when you come and join me soon.

So she had convinced everyone that not only is she dying, but her daughter is dying too. And it was just a matter of time. What Deanna is referring to here is that Hope had convinced everyone that her daughter had a particularly aggressive form of cystic fibrosis. Again, here's Nick.

When we figured out, I believe she was three, and we had been going through pretty consistently a battle with cystic fibrosis, which is a buildup of fluid in the lungs, makes it really hard for kids to breathe. Typically, from my understanding, which was all from research now 15 years ago, what I was told then is they don't generally live past 10, 12, 15 years old. If you can make it to 20, it's incredible. When you're as young as she was, it involves a lot of time in the hospital, and obviously

oxygen, assistance with eating. Through the first around three years of her youngest daughter's life, we spent roughly 50% of it in the hospital. We celebrated two Christmases in the hospital. And I remember

It was a joy when she got to come home, but you just felt more comfortable, like things were going to be better when she was in the hospital. And so we just kind of got used to it. The youngest daughter had port put in. So there's physical and obviously mental scars that come from that. It was a big part of the beginning of her life. In addition to the constant treatment that Hope's youngest daughter was receiving for her alleged cystic fibrosis, she also suffered several life-threatening episodes of anemia.

You know, the investigator would later talk to the doctor who said her levels were just up one week, down the next week, and it didn't make sense because she wasn't bleeding internally and that would be the only thing that would cause that. My understanding is CF patients have problems with iron deficiencies, and so

I can only imagine that she knew that and then when she saw this opportunity, "Ooh, I can give her now issues with anemia," that she took it. But the extreme, the doctors were saying that severe of anemia would not be seen even in the most severe cystic fibrosis cases. The only way that she could have lost that blood is if somebody was intentionally taking it out.

During this period of her life, Hope had been working as the lead chemist in several high-profile positions, including one at a food manufacturer and one at a pharmaceutical company. I ended up talking to her former employer at the lab that she worked at. I was like, when did you get suspicious that something was not right? And he told me that, you know...

Some of the things that she discussed just didn't seem up to the level of understanding of chemistry or science as somebody at her level should have had. And just to clarify, she had told her employer that she had a Ph.D., is that right? Yes, correct.

He mentioned that at some point she'd gotten into a conversation, I think, with his girlfriend. And the girlfriend was asking, well, what was your dissertation on? And he just saw this evasiveness, like clearly she did not want to discuss this topic. And so he just started getting suspicious there. And at that point had asked someone to pull her resume. And when they went to look at the file, there were actually two different resumes in there with some conflicting dates on when she supposedly got her Ph.D.

Adding to that was at some point there was a supervisor at the lab who had come back a day early from vacation. And she walked into the lab and she noticed that there were some petri dishes of pathogens. And they were from a lab that this company no longer received pathogens from. So it stood out to her. And when she came back the next day, they were gone. Right.

And so they went back and they had surveillance videos and they looked at these surveillance videos and they see Hope come in with a big bag and apparently take these petri dishes of pathogens. On top of that, the supervisor who pointed out who was the one who saw these pathogens and kind of raised the red flag, she ended up getting very sick.

as well did as another employee. One of the employees who got sick had just drank some water from a bottle. I believe it was a supervisor who had talked on the phone and ended up getting some crazy rash on her face. So they tested both the water and the phone, and there was basically the same pathogens as had been in this incubator.

So they were suspicious that Hope had purposely poisoned or exposed these employees to these pathogens. And while he couldn't prove that she had done that, he was able to prove that she had never gotten her doctorate in chemistry, that that was a lie. She had applied for the program, but she had not been accepted. And so she was ultimately fired from that. The depth of her lies just went unnoticed.

went into every facet of her life. This story struck me because even though Hope's children obviously got the worst of her abuse, no one in Hope's orbit was really safe. Things started unraveling pretty dramatically for Hope when the Puchers discovered that she didn't actually have cancer. Here's Mike Weber. At the time, he was working for the Tarrant County DA's office, and he was the lead investigator into Hope Ybarra. The doctor couldn't find any record of Hope's cancer.

And Hope's mother asked Fabian Ybarra, Hope's husband, for access to their insurance files so she could find the records. And she went into the files and discovered that Hope did not have cancer. And she had an awareness of Munchausen by proxy. She then became concerned about the victim in this case and made those concerns known to Dr. Schultz at Cook's Children's Hospital.

At this point, the doctors were becoming concerned that Hope's cancer wasn't the only thing that she was lying about. So they asked Hope and Fabian to bring their youngest daughter into the hospital to redo her sweat test. This is a simple non-invasive test that's administered via a sensor on the child's skin to determine whether or not the child has cystic fibrosis. My real involvement didn't come until after they came back for the sweat test and after those sweat tests came back negative for cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. The doctors tell me you don't have it and then not have it. So the previous test had to be falsified. I interviewed Fabian Ybarra pretty early. And I think like any dad, he tried to present himself as being more involved in his child's medical care than he actually was. I think any parent has guilt over not being involved or not seeing anything.

So she took a cab to go take her to the hospital. I was going to meet her at the hospital. And so we all went there and they're doing the swab test. And it's just an easy sweat test and stuff like that. And so they were going to give the youngest one a swab test, a simple swab test. She was licking her thumb because you have sweat and you have sweat everywhere. And she was rubbing it on where they did the test. And I know in my back, wait a minute, is she doing what I think she's doing?

What Fabian's getting at here is that even under scrutiny, Hope was still attempting to tamper with her daughter's test. This was also observed by the nurses in the room. At the time, Hope's family believed everything that she was telling them. It wasn't until many years later that they began to go back over their memories with forensic detail. Again, here's Robyn.

My mom started to dig for answers. What else is she lying about? We started to question everything we knew about Hope. Every little detail of her life that we could pick apart, we did. And my mom was like, "What if she was lying about this? What if she was lying about that?" And she goes,

What if those babies were never real? And I remember the look on her face when she was mortified, starting to break apart the events that happened about that pregnancy. She goes, I was at the hospital. It was real. And then my dad asked her, but did you see them? And she goes, no, I didn't have to see them.

And then that was whenever she just really started to think about how could somebody lie? We had a lot of hope stuff at the house because she came to my parents' house to die. Now my mom had access to her medical records. She started going through boxes. She couldn't find proof of her going to any OB-GYN. I remember one of the first times she went to go see her, my mom went over there and asked her, "Is this true? Did you ever have these grandchildren, my mourning grandchildren that weren't there?"

And my sister, of course, lied to her and said, "No, they were real. All this was real." She kind of held on to that. It took us probably a couple months to realize that the babies weren't true. And so then she asked her in a follow-up visit with her, and my sister admitted.

that they were never real, that she had had some stomach pains. So she was in the hospital for stomach pains. They assumed, you know, ovarian cysts or something. But after that, she ended up having a hysterectomy, supposedly, you know, whether or not, but she still says that that happened. We were still at the hospital for that event. But, you know, down the road now, she says that that's what happened is she had a hysterectomy, not that she lost these babies.

As the Pudgers tried to piece together what was happening to them, Mike continued on his investigation. I asked Mike what it was like the first time he spoke to Hope Ybarra herself. Hope first lied, and I allowed her to lie to me. Provable lies that I had evidence about. I got a complete history, medical history, social history of her and all of her children. And she lied about her middle child and said her middle child had always been healthy. She had presented her middle child with

with cerebral palsy. And actually when we did a forensic interview with the middle child, she talked about how she had to use leg braces and the same leg braces, same mucus vest as the victim when she was younger. Then she told us she was currently a gymnast. You have this dichotomy. She told us she had a miracle recovery and she told us when the victim was born. This is one of the cases where you have the transfer from an older child to a younger child.

The younger child usually gets the brunt of the abuse. It's almost like they practice their craft on the older child.

So you think it's practice and then also that the younger the child is, the more vulnerable they are to this type of abuse. Correct. And we see a lot of premature births with this type of abuse. This victim was born premature and we'll never know. She'll never tell us. We'll never know if she did something to cause that premature birth because she was already committing this abuse against the middle child. That we know.

And, of course, she also had the Munchausen behavior on herself with the years-long cancer hoax. Yes, she had presented her own cancer, which was a lie. And she had, I mean, she had gone through two remissions. She had had parties with the family. The family was completely manipulated by her. It sounds like, in many ways, Hope's interview was run-of-the-mill for child abuse offenders. Yeah.

It definitely wasn't run of the mill in what she told me. It's not often you have someone give you admissions about putting pathogens at least into her daughter's sputum sample. But it was run of the mill in the fact that she first lied and she then, when confronted with facts that proved she was lying, she made alternative statements and then made admissions and then never told the whole truth. That is every abusive head trauma interview I've ever had. That is every physical and sexual abuse interview.

interview I've ever had with children offenders. You rarely ever get the full story. And same thing with hope.

This surprised me when I first learned it, but it's not actually a crime to lie to a doctor about your child's health. So even though Hope's lies were prodigious, Mike had to focus on a crime that he had clear evidence of and which he could charge Hope with. How we ended up charging Hope was a hospital visit where Hope brought the victim in and the victim was anemic and Hope demanded an IV iron treatment.

From what I understand, it's not really a standard treatment because children are very allergic. Many children are allergic to this treatment. Hope was demanding it. She said, the victim's already had this treatment in Dallas. It'll be fine. You can skip the protocol. She wanted the doctor to skip the protocol. The doctor refused to skip protocol. And thank God, because when they started the IV iron treatment, the victim went into anaphylactic shock.

Absent medical intervention, that was a substantial risk of death for the victim. And that is how we ended up charging hope, withdrawing blood from the victim, which caused anemia, which caused an IV iron treatment, which caused anaphylactic shock. Absent medical intervention was a substantial risk of death. So you can see even how convoluted that indictment is and how much of a stretch it is to get there.

So child abuse laws are not designed with this kind of abuser in mind. And so it took a lot of work for Mike to put together this indictment. And they ended up being able to use three things against Hope. The pathogens that she'd put into her child, the blood loss from the anemia that she'd caused, and the faked cystic fibrosis test.

She still claims that her daughter had to get the feeding tube because she was choking on her milk. She still insists that was true, though she later admitted to me that she also remembers pouring water in her daughter's formula so she wouldn't gain weight. She almost at times seemed to me like she couldn't tell the difference between the truth and the lie.

This resonated with me because this feeling of trying to figure out what the person who's lying to you actually believes is,

is really disorienting. And during this time, the putchers were going through the same process of trying to understand how much hope understood about her own behavior. And in fact, when they first found out she was lying about her cancer, they suspected she was having delusions. But I just want to reiterate here that munchausen by proxy abuse is really separate from having delusions. It is intentional and it's done knowingly.

And I had asked her, "Well, tell me what you do remember doing."

And she said, well, I remember stirring salt in the water so that I could alter her test and give her a false positive for cystic fibrosis. I remember doctor shopping. When a doctor wouldn't believe me or wouldn't do something I wanted, I remember going to other doctors. And I said, so what are some of the lies? And she said, I wasn't a drum major. And that just was such a strange thing for her to say because...

Here's one of the lies she's admitting she told, that she was never a drum major. But I had a yearbook that shows she was a drum major. I don't know why it was that little detail that bothered me so much, but it was because it was such a little detail. And for her to now tell me it was a lie when I have all this other evidence showing it's true, it really does put anything she says into this light of, is it true? Is it false? Like, can you believe anything?

Did it feel like she was talking about a different person almost? At times it really did. And she tried to present herself as a different person, like this wasn't right. She kept pointing to her head and saying, this wasn't right. I was crazy up here and I thought I had to do this stuff to get the attention.

I think she was trying to present herself as a changed person now, as someone who sees that. She was truthful in that she acknowledged that this was something she's still battled with. That there wasn't a magic pill she could take to cure this.

For all the lies that she's told, Hope has pretty consistently admitted to the fact that she has a real problem with the truth. Another reporter that Hope spoke to while she was in prison asked her why people listening to the interview should believe anything that she says given her history of lying. And she said to that reporter, nobody should believe me.

These moments in these interviews where Hope is honest about her own dishonesty are these weird, glimmering moments of truth and of something like accountability that you really can't find anywhere else in any other interviews with perpetrators. And that was one of the big reasons that I so wanted to talk to Hope in particular beyond the parallels that her family and my family had.

She spoke to Deanna Boyd about her day-to-day struggles with the truth. And that day-to-day, she had issues with telling the truth. She said, when I leave this interview today and I go back to their dorm...

She said, they're all going to be like, where have you been? Where have you been? And as I'm walking back, I'm going to be thinking like, what fantastic lie can I tell these people? And it's going to take all I have to just to tell them the truth that my doctor's appointment was delayed. And then I had this interview and I thought that I'm sure was the truth. Ultimately, Hope took a plea deal and ended up serving 10 years in prison.

She served every day of her 10-year sentence. Fabian ended up divorcing her. He raised his three children by himself. I've spent a lot of time with the Putschers. And there was considerable fallout from this situation that went beyond just what it did to them emotionally. Paul was forced to resign from his job. They had to explain to all of the people who had donated money for Hope's cancer that it had been a lie. A lot of people thought they were in on it.

When I was first looking up the Putschers to reach out to them, the first two people I reached out to were Fabian Ybarra and Susan Putscher.

I really wanted to talk to Susan because I just really admired the fact that she had called Dr. Schultz and told her that she was worried that Hope was lying. I know that is not an easy call to make. She did the right thing and she did it right away. But just I have so much admiration for her because that is certainly not how a lot of families behave in this situation as we'll hear about more in some of these other stories we talk about.

I reached out to her and I sent her a Facebook message and I didn't realize until I had actually gotten in touch with Rob and Puchard that Susan had died in 2019 and she died about six months before Hope got out of prison.

I know that Susan and Paul visited Hope while she was in prison. Hope continued to lie to them. She continued to lie about the abuse. She continued to lie about not remembering anything that had happened. She had claimed to have this diabetic coma and said that she didn't remember doing any of these things, though she sort of

admitted in a way that she'd done them. She said, "Oh, if the doctor said I did them, I must have done them." But she didn't really take accountability and she was still pretending to be deaf and her parents knew she wasn't deaf. And so I think the visits became so frustrating to them that they told Hope that if she continued that behavior of lying to them, that they would no longer come to see her. And so she did continue to lie to them. And so they ended up not visiting her any longer.

A meeting with the Butchers, what a loving, wonderful family they are. And I just got such a sense of how much they loved Hope and that they were willing to just do anything for her. It really helped me have this sense of peace that I could look at them and think, this is a nice, loving family and they didn't deserve any of the things that happened to them and they did not cause this.

So I think that was a really unique and profound experience for me to get to break through that with them. It's not that I went into any of this process thinking that I was going to be some detached sort of journalistic observer. Like, I know I'm not, and I don't want to present myself as though I am. But having that experience on the human level was really such a gift for me. Listening to these first two episodes of the show really takes me back.

to not only when we were recording it, but when we were preparing to actually launch this show into the world, which happened the first time in the spring of 2022. And what I hear when I hear that very last clip of the episode is...

an earlier version of the episode because these two episodes in particular went through many, many rounds of revisions, partly because we were getting our footing on what the show was going to be and partly because of lawyers. And so I wanted to tell a little bit of that backstory because when I hear that clip about how it had brought me peace to meet the Putcher family and find out that they were so nice and that they really appeared to be, you know, just this

very loving family that hadn't done anything to sort of cause hope to do what she did. What I'm not saying there is the reason that brought me peace was because I then could look at my own family in that same light and sort of hold us in that same space of, you know, we were a nice loving family. That can be true and this can still happen. And I think that is sort of, you know, that is one of the big points of this season, right? Is that it could happen to anyone. It is the mom next door.

And the reason that we ended up taking that piece out, along with some other things I think originally that may have been there in some ghost version of the first two episodes, is because there was a fair amount of conflict around these two episodes in particular when we were launching the show. So the story of how this show got out into the world is this.

brought the idea originally to Tina Noel, my producer and large media. And I, you know, had met Tina on another project and she, you know, is a brilliant producer and I brought her this idea and we started making the show. And originally it was really this passion project. I envisioned making one season of it and I

we made it as a limited series. We made it as these, you know, sort of discrete eight episodes. And, you know, I think along the way as we were making it, we really felt like this was something that could have a big audience and could be really, you know, basically we just really thought, oh, we've got something here. This is really fascinating. And we ended up

shopping it around a bit and we found a distributor to partner with. And I was very excited about that. I had a little bit of a social media following at the time from being an author, but I didn't have any history as a podcaster. This felt like a really good way to launch it, felt like a really good way for the show to find an audience kind of right out of the gate. And throughout that, there was a lot of conversations about creative control and really wanting to maintain that. And

Obviously, there's a lot in this show that is of a really sensitive nature, and we did vigorously legally vet the content that's in it, particularly about my sister, because it is tricky. My sister has never been charged with a crime, so that's a much trickier case to talk about than one like Hopi Bar's where there was a 10-year prison sentence. That's just a lot easier to discuss.

But that's also the reason that most of the cases that happen don't get talked about is because it's very rare, actually, for them to end in criminal conviction. So, you know, I was very sort of choosy and limited with what I shared about my sister's story. I really kept it to the pieces that I was present for. And also, you know, even at that point, I had quite a bit of documentation and corroboration for the things that had happened.

And so again, I vetted all of it with my lawyer to make sure it was sound, to make sure it was usable. And I let my distributor know that was the case. And I said, you know, it's very likely we'll get some kind of challenge from her because that happened around my book. I'd gotten a cease and desist about the novel that after saying publicly that it was inspired by my family's story and, you know, that hadn't come to anything. And so I assured them I'd done my due diligence. And then sure enough,

One day before the show was supposed to be released, the first two episodes were supposed to go out. And I had been, you know, promoting it everywhere. I'd released a press release, the whole thing. It heated up. And one day before it was supposed to come out, I got a cease and desist from my sister's lawyers. Again, not a shock. Knew it was coming. Was kind of like, okay, never a fun time. Never a fun time to get a letter like that. But...

You know, I felt like I'd done my work and could stand by everything that I'd put in the episodes. And, you know, the part that I did not really factor in is that

large companies have a different appetite for risk than independent podcasters. And basically, we could not come to an agreement with our distributor about what should stay in and what should go. And basically, they wanted me to take out a lot more about my story with my sister than I was comfortable taking out. And I really felt like

I wanted to stand by that story and had every right to tell it and felt like it was really important context around my connection to the topic and my reporting on the show and felt strongly that it should stay. They felt otherwise, so we parted ways and things got delayed. This also all was playing out while I was extremely pregnant with my son and

And sure enough, we came to an agreement about our separation and I went into labor that night. So I think he was waiting until I could get all of that sorted out. So that was a harrowing experience for sure. And while all of that was going on and, you know, obviously while things were playing out, I could not discuss any of it publicly. And I sort of

originally said, okay, our release date's going to be delayed, and then it sort of just disappeared. And in the meantime, the two episodes published for a little while, and then they were taken down. And so it just was very unclear, I think, to people watching this situation what was going on.

And in the meantime, my brother-in-law, Andy, was going all over social media saying I was a liar, saying that that's the reason it had been taken down. And of course, that was just, you know, not true. And it was embarrassing. So it was a really difficult situation. And, you know, what ended up happening, we held onto the show because of the baby that just

was not the ideal time to launch it when I had a, you know, one day old baby. And so we waited to launch it into the fall of 2022 and, you know, just launched the show independently. And, you know, we built up a decent audience right away. And then, you know, in our second season, the show really took off and that made it possible to keep the podcast independent. And, you

That's all down to you and your support, honestly. Everyone really supporting this show, both as subscribers or listening to our ads or sharing the show. I mean, it's really down to that. That's how independent podcasters make things happen. And so I'm so grateful for that. It was such a good lesson for me on this topic in particular that, you know, there are, and this is not to knock podcast networks, there's a lot of amazing podcasts that are on networks. There are networks that do really, really,

bold reporting on difficult topics and there's obviously a ton of good stuff happening out there but for this topic in particular I think I have for years been dealing with the media's reticence around talking about the cases that don't end in convictions right often the only cases that make

the media are cases with convictions or furthermore cases where the child dies. And those are not as helpful to talk about in terms of helping people understand that this is a real issue that is happening to people across the country, that it sort of could happen to any family, which was the point that I really wanted to make. And it's strange listening back to these two first episodes, which again, because these were the ones that were the point of contention. I

It really takes me back there to my, you know, massively pregnant, stressed out, crying self, trying to figure this whole situation out. But it really strikes me that I actually didn't share very much detail about my sister's story at all, especially compared to what I ended up sharing. So if you are listening to these two episodes for the first time and you have a lot of questions about what actually happened with my sister and who she is and what that case looked like, stay tuned because I did end up sharing that story.

case in detail in the second season of our podcast. If you can't wait to listen, I want to go check that out now. That's episode seven. I'll include a link in the show notes. But actually, it was this whole legal back and forth that really set me out to find out how much there was in the public record. And it was around this time that I opened a public records request into my sister's case. And that is where I got all the information that I ended up sharing. And that's the reason I was able to end up sharing, because I didn't think that so much would be public.

This was a real crash course in reporting and how to report on a tough case. And sure enough, a

again, most of the stories that we talk about on the show are not stories that ended in a criminal conviction because that's so rare. And so I think that this experience really gave me a very valuable blueprint on how to do that and just also how to sort of have a thick skin with, you know, when you experience pushback, which I was always expecting. And sure enough, I've gotten plenty of it as the show's now been on the air for more than a year. And, you know, meeting other podcasters has been really helpful in this arena.

A podcaster I'm friendly with, Jordan Harbinger, who also has a background as a lawyer, gave me a very good piece of advice that I like to hang on to, which is that a cease and desist is just an expensive piece of paper. So I always like to keep that in my mind as I'm going forward and not get too spooked about people saber rattling. The lesson there is good lawyers are worth it. And it was really an early lesson in staying true to the mission of the show. So

So thank you for listening, and I will talk to you soon. We're going to have a really special update in the next episode, so stay tuned for that. On the next episode, we'll take a look at the system that caught Hope Ybarra and talk about why there seems to be such a high rate of this particular crime in Tarrant County, Texas.

If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at MunchausenSupport.com. We have resources there from some of the top experts in the country, and we can connect you with professionals who can help.

If you are curious about this show and the topic of Munchausen by proxy, follow me on Instagram at Andrea Dunlop. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash nobody should believe me. And if monetary support is not an option for you right now, you can also rate and review the podcast on Apple and share on your social media. Word of mouth is so important for podcasts and we really appreciate it.

Our lead producer is Tina Knoll. The show was edited by Lisa Gray with help from Wendy Nardi. Jeff Gall is our sound engineer. Additional scoring and music by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Shupak. Also special thanks to Maria Paliologos, Joelle Knoll, and Katie Klein for project coordination. I'm your host and executive producer, Andrea Dunlop. ♪

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